Peggy Liddick: How Destroy a World Class Program and Ruin A Generation of Gymnasts at the Same Time
Peggy Liddick came to fame as American olympic great Shannon Miller’s beam technical coach in the 1990s. Like most female coaches of the era she was over shadowed by flamboyant men who were given credit (and also who took most of the blame) for their work. Though Miller was an undeniable success even in the 1990s Liddick drew attention for her manipulative coaching appearing in Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. A ground breaking book on abuse and eating disorders in gymnastics and figure skating Liddick described it as “this is somebody's attempt to cause controversy that will sell. It was purely a money-making endeavor.“ The book describes one of the reasons that Kerri Strug would leave that gym being that Liddick insisted that she compete on a torn muscle. Nothing to see here. No reason to change anything they were doing.
She would later casually drop in an interview decades later that Shannon Miller had a broken wrist while in Atlanta.
In 1997 Peggy moved to Australia to take a job as the head coach of their women’s program. Australia was at the time a country on the rise regularly featuring at Olympic and World championship team finals and having individual gymnasts winning medals. With the 2000 Olympics looming she was seen as a key figure to bring them success at a home Olympics. She would stay in that job for two decades until 2017 becoming an Australian citizen in the process.
Over the course of her tenure Australia would all but disappear from high level international gymnastics. The low point being the 2013 World Championship when Liddick set a qualifying standard to make the team that no one met and the country sent no athletes to the world championships. A review of Gymnastics Australia by the Australian Human Rights Commission was damning describing just about every kind of abuse in their system from the top down. The above images are a letter Liddick wrote to a 15 year old girl gas lighting her telling her it wasn’t her choice to quit the sport because she owed it to the adults who had invested so much hard work in her.
After leaving her post in Australia she was on the staff of equally troubled British Gymnastics and has applied for the position of head of the American national team. And she still gets speaking engagements touting Miller’s accomplishments from 25 years ago.
